Over at my day job, our crack designer Neale has been having fun contrasting our new lightning-fast setup process against imaginary installations from the past. He’s mocked up out-of-date technologies like boxed software and cassettes. Most recently, we posted his rendering of a 5.25” floppy disk:

Apparently, however, this particular technology is not as obsolete as we thought. In fact, it’s essential to at least one public transit system in the US:

[A] portion of the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, or Muni, rail system still uses an Automatic Train Control system installed in 1998 that requires its software to be loaded with obsolete 5¼ -inch floppy disks each morning.

Yikes! Though Muni is working to upgrade this system, that upgrade may still be years away.

For more on floppy disks in the modern era, see this interview with Tom Persky. He’s the owner of floppydisk.com and self-proclaimed “last man standing in the floppy disk business”.